Sometime around the year 200 CE, the last household in Roman Palestine in which children grew up hearing Hebrew at the dinner table fell silent. Aramaic had already taken over the streets; Greek dominated the cities; the Mishnah was being compiled in a Hebrew that scholars wrote but increasingly did not speak. For the next 1,700 years, Hebrew survived as the language of the synagogue, the prayer book, the Torah scroll, and the letter from one rabbi to another — a written language used by literate adults, but no child's first words. Then, somehow, that changed. Hebrew is now the everyday spoken language of about nine million people, around half of them native speakers who learned it as babies. Smaller-scale revivals exist (Cornish, Manx, Wampanoag), but Hebrew remains the largest-scale and most thoroughly documented case of a language that had ceased to be anyone's mother tongue being brought back to daily community use.
The single person most associated with the revival is Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), a Lithuanian-born Jewish scholar who emigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1881 with one obsession: that Jews would only become a nation again if they spoke Hebrew. He made his own household the first laboratory. His son Itamar Ben-Avi, born in Jerusalem in 1882, is generally regarded as the first native speaker of Modern Hebrew in roughly 1,700 years. Ben-Yehuda forbade any other language in the home; his wife, who didn't speak Hebrew when they married, learned it on the job. Itamar reportedly spoke no language at all until he was around four, and worried family members urged Ben-Yehuda to relent. He didn't.
Ben-Yehuda also waged a vocabulary war. Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew between them have perhaps 8,000 lemmas — fine for prayer, hopeless for buying a newspaper. So Ben-Yehuda invented words. Some are still everyday Israeli speech:
- milon (מילון) — "dictionary", from milah "word".
- iton (עיתון) — "newspaper", from et "time".
- ofnayim (אופניים) — "bicycle", dual form of ofan "wheel".
- glida (גלידה) — "ice cream", from a root meaning "to freeze".
- chashmal (חשמל) — "electricity", repurposing a mysterious Biblical word from Ezekiel.
He compiled the gigantic Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew in 17 volumes (continued and completed after his death by his son and others), and helped found the Va'ad ha-Lashon ha-Ivrit (Hebrew Language Committee, 1890), which became today's Academy of the Hebrew Language — still the official Israeli body that coins new technical vocabulary (machshev "computer", yisumon "app").
Modern historians of Hebrew (Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Bernard Spolsky and others) are quick to add nuance. Ben-Yehuda was not alone; he was the loudest voice in a wave of teachers, especially the Hebrew-in-Hebrew schoolteachers from the 1890s onward, organized from 1903 in the Union of Hebrew Teachers, who switched their classrooms from Yiddish and Russian to Hebrew, building the first generation of fluent users one schoolroom at a time. Zuckermann has argued that what was actually born is not strictly "revived Hebrew" but a hybrid he calls Israeli — a Semitic surface layer (the morphology, much vocabulary) over a deeply European (especially Yiddish and Slavic) syntactic and phonetic substrate. By that view, native Israeli speakers are heirs both to King David and to the Tsarist-era Vilna yeshiva.
"The Jews did not manage to revive the language of Isaiah. It is simply impossible to revive a language as it used to be." — Ghil'ad Zuckermann, BBC Future, 22 March 2019
By 1922, when Ben-Yehuda died, Hebrew was one of the three official languages of British Mandate Palestine. By 1948 it was the principal language of the newly-founded State of Israel. Today it is used in schools, literature, cinema, technology, shops and playgrounds. Its return to intergenerational transmission after centuries of mainly liturgical and literary use remains unusual among documented language-revival movements.